Twitter Stock Tanks as Quarterly Financials Leak Out

In what turned out to be an unpleasant surprise for Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR), the company’s March 2015 quarter financials were leaked online just a half hour before the close of trading.

Selerity, a financial intelligence platform, was the first to leak Twitter’s quarter one financials, and cited the social networking service’s investor relations website as the source of the leak. The quarter one 2015 financial report showed that Twitter had failed to reach analyst forecasts for revenue, which had immediately sent TWTR plummeting by over 18 percent by the time trading had closed. Twitter shares closed yesterday at $42.27, a decrease of $9.39 from the day prior, and have remained flat in pre-market trading at $42.29 as of this writing.

Despite yesterday’s debacle, Twitter had some good news to report in its quarter one 2015 financials. The microblogging site now has a total of 302 million monthly active users, which is an 18 percent increase year-over-year, and a solid increase over the 288 million users reported in the December 2014 quarter. The company’s revenue, however, was tepid at $436 million, or over $20 million less than the $456.2 million figure forecasted by Wall Street analysts. Revenue guidance for quarter two 2015 is slightly lower, at $470 million to $485 million. The company also posted a loss of $162 million last quarter, which is a significantly larger loss than the year-ago quarter’s loss of $132 million.

According to quotes from Twitter officials, including CEO Richard (Dick) Costolo, the company’s below-expectations revenue was mainly due to its acquisition of TellApart. Costolo himself said that contributions from Twitter’s newer direct response offerings was another driver that brought revenue down below expectations.